“Parachute NYC: an alternative approach to mental health treatment and crisis services” has been awarded $17,608,085 to fund “a need-adapted treatment model (NATM) intervention for Medicaid beneficiaries and other people with serious mental illness who have a diagnosis of psychosis … the program will use peer health navigators, nurse practitioners, mobile crisis teams, and crisis respite centers to provide early engagement, continuity of care and combined peer and professional community service thus shifting the focus of care from crisis intervention to long-term, community-integrated treatment with access to primary care, improving crisis management and reducing emergency room visits and hospital admissions.”
Sounds like nothing but community commitment, from the state that champions it the most with Kendra’s Law. More endless waste of taxpayer millions for the psychiatry industrial complex of BS community clowns filling distressed peoples’ heads with lies.
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I should have made a note: this initiative was spearheaded by Peter Stastny, a founder of the International Network of Treatment Alternatives for Recovery. He’s been one of the key people fomenting change from the medical model. The need adapted treatment model is, as Robert Whitaker says, a “selective use” of medication model, in the vein that Bob finds there is evidence for. I spoke to Peter about the initiative a year ago, and he was not highly optimistic about getting it funded. The fact that it has been can only be taken as a positive sign. Peter would have liked the initiative to be even more out of “the system,” but the fact that it’s getting so well funded I can only hope means Peter has truly prevailed in his argument that the NATM is truly effective and a cost saver.
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That sounds reasonable, if they can find enough people who are not already on community commitment, to ‘work with’.
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I agree that the only people who will receive this will be people already trapped in the system and therefore forced to take the drugs either by court order or as a requirement for services.
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I also believe that this will most likely be used to aggressively keep patients on the drugs since it’s aim appears to be reducing hospital visits and thereby cutting costs. I can not imagine any non-drug alternative co-existing, let alone working with, the current mental health system which this program unfortunately belongs to.
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